Under this he had penned a quatrain of rather obscure meaning and weakly versification:
“It always haps, when there are three,
But two can bide in unity;
That two may long their gladness keep,
The third should bury sorrow deep.”
Garde read these lines and then read them again, more puzzled by the second perusal than she had been by the first. She began then to feel wounded. She was ready to cry. The brooch had made her heart bound with joy. Then she remembered that Adam had procured it for her years before, since when his affections might have been transferred, his ideals might have been altered and the sense in which he gave it her might have been reduced to something utterly unromantic. He might indeed have given it to her only because of his desire to keep a foolish promise made in his boyhood.
The lines were not an explanation of his conduct. If they meant that she was a third party, interfering with the happiness of himself and Prudence, then the unkindness of it all was not the full depth of its possibilities—it was impudent, arrogant and fairly hateful, in that light.
On the other hand, could it be possible that Adam did not mean that she was such a third party as the lines indicated, and if so, what did he mean? Was he himself such a third party? This appeared impossible on the very face of it, for not only was Garde not interested in, and happy with, some other person, but if she had been, Adam could not possibly have known it, and certainly, in the two times they had met, she had given him no reason for supposing that anything of the sort could exist.
It was too much for her wearied brain to cope with. She had puzzled over Adam’s conduct every moment since their meeting in the woods, till she could think no more. There was the beautiful brooch, and here were these ominous, enigmatical lines. All she knew was that she was very unhappy.
Adam, in the meantime, made progress back to the tavern as if he were all but becalmed and had no more than steerage way at the best. He had only one thing to be glad about, and that was that his beef-eaters would not be at the Crow and Arrow to meet him. They had already taken up quarters on the brig. There Adam expected to join them, with the last of his worldly goods, when he should have taken final leave of Wainsworth.